Nagios: Authentication issue, .htaccess keeps popping up with every refresh

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Dec 102012
 

Nagios-authentication
We moved our Nagios installation to a new (High performance) server. Some users started complaining that with every refresh of their browser screen the http password box appeared and asked for the login and password of the secure site.

After some searching around in log files it hit me:

10.248.2.198 – blaat [05/Dec/2012:16:00:13 +0100] “GET /nagios/media/hostdown.wav HTTP/1.1” 401 493 “-” “NSPlayer/12.00.7601.17514 WMFSDK/12.00.7601.17514”
10.248.2.198 – blaat [05/Dec/2012:16:00:15 +0100] “GET /nagios/media/hostdown.wav HTTP/1.1” 401 493 “-” “NSPlayer/12.00.7601.17514 WMFSDK/12.00.7601.17514”

The browser (IE 9.x in this case) loads the “status.cgi”. Because there is a hostdown, I wants to play the according media file. IE apparently don’t has any build in decoder for .wav files. And it uses the NSplayer embedded within IE for this. Problem is that somewhere between parsing and remembering the L&P for this site/file there goes something wrong. Because with every refresh (and thus every get of the .wav file) the password box pop-ups.

Highly annoying. Not want to lose to much time to fix this, I decided that the easiest way was to make all *.wav free files.
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Putty: Create your own (private) proxy server on the road

 (reverse)Proxy  No Responses »
Dec 032012
 


So you’re on the road. Being the road warrior you are, you can appreciate the finer things in live. For example some privacy while surfing the web (never heard of that anyway, but lets continue). Be it in a boring hotel room, a local coffee bar, or some other place connected through the Internet by means of WiFi. Using an WiFi encryption will probably make your browsing session a private one from “strangers” who are trying to eavesdrop on you, but if the know the pre-shared-key (WEP/WPA) the can still with a little bit of trouble read your data/information! And none the less, the proprietor of the gateway/router is often still in the position to eavesdrop on all the websites (and content) of websites you’re visiting.

Even if you’re visiting an SSL website they still can see “which” website you’re visiting. From there on everything is encrypted (including the URL’s, payload, etc).

There’s this magnificent little 444KB program called putty.exe . Mostly you use it to connect from a Windows PC to a (distanced) server running an SSH daemon to manage the hosts. Nobody can eavesdrop on you because it’s completely encrypted. Butt this program has some really nice/crazy features. It can act as you local (HTTP) socks proxyserver when you’re on the road.
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